Using the Three Key Phases of Change to Strengthen Your Rest Ethic
How to unlearn the harmful guilt we associate with time off through permission, prioritization, and persistence
Most of us are becoming increasingly aware of how critical rest and time off are for our mental health, our overall wellbeing, and even our professional performance.
Many of us have come face-to-face with the negative consequences of not getting enough detachment, and we’re aware of the danger. Yet actually disconnecting and taking time off seems to be more and more difficult.
We just can’t shake the guilt that we associate with not constantly working. It’s been too deeply ingrained in our culture and our psyche.
My business partner John Fitch and I recently collaborated with Deloitte’s chief well-being officer Jen Fisher and her team on a report about exactly this issue — which the Deloitte team aptly dubbed “the disconnect disconnect.” The core question: how do we close the gap between needing time off and actually taking it?
In a nutshell, the answer for companies is that simply implementing better policies around time off is not enough.
As legendary management expert Peter Drucker once said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” We can extend this to say that culture also eats policy for breakfast.
Policy changes that do not also change the culture or take the existing culture into account are doomed to fail, even if they were put in place with the best intentions.
Any change in policy needs to be embedded into a culture that supports this change.
This leads to two complementary options: create policies that fit your culture or build a culture that fits your chosen policies.
John and I help companies achieve this via workshops, coaching, and other tools — aligning their policies with their culture and building a strong rest ethic for their entire organization.
One idea that we use when developing time off strategies with clients is approaching the transformation in three phases:
Permission
Prioritization
Persistence
While this framework was formulated with businesses in mind, it is also applicable at the individual level.
Permission
The very first — and maybe most difficult — step is to give yourself permission to actually take time off.
This involves shedding the guilt we associate with rest.
Ultimately, permission comes from culture, not just from rules.
Few companies have rules in place that say employees have to eat lunch at their desks. Yet, if that is the prevalent culture it might as well be corporate policy since no one will feel like they have permission to do otherwise.
Similarly, as an individual, you have to surround yourself with a culture that celebrates rest and leisure, rather than denouncing it as a waste of time, or worse, a sin.
This is difficult, especially for driven people (I speak from experience…). But the key is to acknowledge that recharging and taking care of yourself is in everyone’s best interest.
Not only is it good for your own well-being, but it also makes you a better friend, a better parent, a better partner, a more effective leader, and a more creative and productive worker.
Let me say this again: you taking time off seriously is in everyone’s best interest. Like an inhale needs to be followed by an exhale, your work ethic needs to be complemented by an equally strong rest ethic.
Think of top athletes. Rest and recovery are top priorities for pros like LeBron James and his trainer Mike Mancias. They don’t boast about how late they were in the gym grinding things out. They know that to achieve peak performance when it counts, switching off effectively and consistently is key.
Treat yourself like an elite performer, no matter what your profession is.
A change in language can help.
For example, you can speak of taking time to incubate on ideas or allowing your subconscious to see the bigger picture of a problem, rather than saying you’re taking a break.
And most importantly, stop using complaints around busyness and overwork that are actually just boasts in disguise. “Look at me, I’m sooo busy, I must be doing something important.” Don’t tie your self-worth to this, unless you soon want to be replaced by machines that will easily out-busy, out-hustle, and out-grind you anytime.
Allow yourself to embrace time off.
A helpful and concrete step is to define your values around time off and write them down. I previously talked about writing a “field manual” for your life. You can apply the same idea to your time off principles.
Keep reminding yourself of these principles and values, and ideally share and communicate them with the people close to you, both personal and professional. Culture doesn’t develop in a vacuum.
It might be a slow and gradual process, but eventually, you will get to a point where you feel like you’ve genuinely given yourself permission. Not just by stating rules, but by changing the culture that surrounds you, and slowly unlearning the guilt.
Prioritization
Once you’ve given yourself permission to rest, you’ve passed the highest hurdle. Now it’s time to take action.
If you previously established your time off principles and values, you can turn them into practice now.
Think about what time off practices are most aligned with your values, and experiment with them.
John and I believe that a rest ethic is something highly personal. We can give you lots of ideas, and show you examples of what worked for some highly successful people (as we do for example in our book), but ultimately you have to find out for yourself what works best for you and fits your circumstances and environment.
Whatever you choose, try to implement constant behavioral nudges, things that remind you of what you decided to practice.
With our clients, we also work with the leadership teams to make sure they model the right behaviors and communicate the benefits of their rest to their teams.
This might be harder to replicate on an individual level, but if you’ve communicated your values with the people around you, they might be able to hold you accountable. Or you can act in the leadership role and model the right behavior to them, strengthening the overall culture around you.
Getting an accountability partner and going through this process together can also be great.
Persistence
Building a rest ethic and implementing strong time off practices does not happen instantaneously.
Even if you’ve given yourself permission and started prioritizing the right actions, it’s a constant process of improvement and (un)learning.
The more regularly you remind yourself about the importance of time off and the values and guidelines you established, the better, and the more it will stick. Why not put your guidelines on your fridge? Or in the bathroom? Or set regular calendar reminders?
For data-driven people like myself, tracking your behaviors can also be a powerful tool. Our perception can often deviate from our actual behaviors. Measuring them can make this concrete and help us course correct. To use another Drucker quote: “What gets measured gets managed.”
With our corporate clients, we also discuss the idea of enforcing time off measures if necessary. Some companies have seen great results with strict disincentives, such as people not getting paid for days off if they are found to be working or checking in on company emails during their time off — once rest becomes accepted as an integral part of the work, there are consequences if you don’t do it.
Think about how you could replicate that for yourself. Can you place bets with your friends or partner, promising them to do some chores or even pay them money if you fall back into the habit of busyness? Loss aversion is powerful, and negative incentives can work wonders.
Whatever practices you choose to implement for yourself, you should regularly reassess if they are the right practices for the culture that’s surrounding you, or if you are pushing the culture in the right direction that supports your chosen practices.
And there is absolutely no shame in updating or upgrading your guidelines, values, and practices along the way.
We constantly evolve, and our seasons in life change. Our rest ethic can and should evolve along with us.
Start by giving yourself permission to set out on this journey!